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If the cur­rent, almost dai­ly rev­e­la­tions about the sex­u­al­ly preda­to­ry behav­ior of pow­er­ful men demon­strate any­thing, it’s the per­va­sive­ness of sex­u­al violence–against girls and women and men and boys–in Amer­i­can soci­ety...

Ican­not tell you how excit­ed I am that Words for What Those Men Have Done, my sec­ond full-length col­lec­tion of poet­ry, is offi­cial­ly in the world. And I am equal­ly excit­ed to announce the New York City book launch, which will be on...

I met my Har­vey Wein­stein when I was around 13 years old. He was the head wait­er at the cater­ing hall where I worked, and he spent the next three or four years grop­ing and fondling me as often and in as many ways as he could. Once, when we...

(The begin­ning of this post has been edit­ed because I acci­den­tal­ly post­ed the wrong draft.) I’ve been try­ing to write some­thing in response to Char­lottesville for the past two weeks, but I’ve had a hard time find­ing the words. It’s not...

The post that sta­tis­tic comes from is from 2011. It’s by Olivia Snai­je, Ara­bic and Hebrew: The Pol­i­tics of Lit­er­ary Trans­la­tion, on the blog called Pub­lish­ing Per­spec­tives, and it is a shame­ful sta­tis­tic if I ever saw one...

Twen­ty years or so ago, not too long after I first start­ed teach­ing at the col­lege where I am still a pro­fes­sor, one of my colleagues–the woman who start­ed the institution’s Jew­ish Stud­ies Project–tried to start a...

Today is Shab­bat Nachamu, the Sab­bath of Con­so­la­tion. Last year at this time, I was on a fam­i­ly vaca­tion in Europe, sit­ting in our host’s din­ing room in Swe­den, ear­ly in the morn­ing while every­one else was still asleep, and writ­ing...

About two-and-a-half years ago, I post­ed about Mernissi’s book because read­ing it was an instruc­tive jour­ney into my own igno­rance about Islam, par­tic­u­lar­ly about an aspect of that reli­gion that, to put it mild­ly, sticks in the craw of...

Not too long ago, I received from my pub­lish­er, Guer­ni­ca Edi­tions, the final proof of the cov­er of my new book of poems, Words For What Those Men Have Done—see above—and I am real­ly hap­py with it. The design, of course, is the work...

Because a priv­i­leged man’s life is “unre­mark­able,” he is less like­ly to know how his social posi­tion affects his life. A “white” man knows he is “white,” but he is like­ly to have lit­tle idea how this iden­ti­ty shapes his social world, much less his sex­u­al­i­ty. He’s rarely forced to stop and think about it. Any inter­per­son­al or emo­tion­al dif­fi­cul­ties he might have are thus made to appear as indi­vid­ual wor­ries. This illu­sion of a ful­ly autonomous self lets priv­i­leged men act with less con­cern about the social impact of their actions—they are more “free” than oth­ers. Yet, this free­dom makes them less able to iden­ti­fy the links between their con­cerns and the larg­er social envi­ron­ment. Because of this hyper­indi­vid­u­al­i­ty, itself social­ly con­struct­ed, priv­i­leged men are vul­ner­a­ble to intense feel­ings of self-blame and iso­la­tion when some­thing goes wrong. It makes them less able to under­stand how their lives relate to the lives of those around them, and less able to respond to the social forces that dai­ly shape their lives.

It’s hard to write about craft when you’re talk­ing about a trans­la­tion, espe­cial­ly if you can’t read the orig­i­nal, because it’s not always pos­si­ble to know whose craft you’re talk­ing about, the translator’s or the author’s. So, for...

Think of a judi­cial sys­tem that not only favors het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty but reserves its favor for spe­cif­ic types of het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty: not S/M—that could cost you your kids; not polyfidelity—that could cost you your kids too; not for pay—that could cost you your kids and put you in jail. Think of the African-Amer­i­can, Lati­no, and Chi­nese men who have been lynched for the mere sus­pi­cion of look­ing at a white woman. What­ev­er bio­log­i­cal ground our bod­ies pro­vide, “male lust” is clear­ly a high­ly regulated—and there­fore social—affair, shaped through a deployed and near­ly ubiq­ui­tous series of sticks and car­rots. Remov­ing these pres­sures, or adopt­ing a dif­fer­ent set, would rad­i­cal­ly change the way we think about the social/biological cat­e­gories “male” and “sex­u­al­i­ty.”